The present invention relates in general to performance monitoring in a wireless cellular telephone network, and, more specifically, to a tool for assisting customer service and maintenance personnel in responding to and alleviating customer inquiries or complaints.
Wireless cellular telephone networks deploy large numbers of cell sites within their coverage areas. Each cell site includes an antenna for transmitting and receiving radio signals over a respective geographic area. Coverage areas for adjacent cells overlap so that as a cellular subscriber moves from one cell to another a handoff can occur between cells.
There are various practical and economic concerns in locating and building each cell site. Various geographic features and the availability of real estate result in an irregular spacing of cell sites. In addition, the density of subscriber traffic (i.e., number of simultaneous users) in some regions requires cell sites to be packed at a higher density than in areas with a lower subscriber traffic volume. A higher cell site density results in an increase in the overlapping areas as well.
The actual coverage pattern for the antenna of any particular cell site is typically not the same in all directions because at any particular distance, various structures or geographic features may produce shadowing, for example. Moreover, a particular antenna pattern may be deliberately manipulated to provide some directionality using specialized antenna design and placement in order to compensate for the irregular spacing of cell sites.
In using a cellular telephone within the wireless network, performance issues such as dropped calls, blocked calls, or noisy calls inevitably occur. Cellular carriers typically provide customer service representatives for handling service inquiries and complaints from customers experiencing these problems. When a customer has experienced a performance problem in connection with a particular wireless telephone call, the customer doesn't know the identity of the cell site that handled the problem call. At best, the customer may provide an address or general description of the place where the problem occurred. Consequently, it has been difficult to relate service problems experienced by one customer with those of other customers. Furthermore, a customer service representative has not been able to determine for themselves or to inform the customer whether a particular performance issue is due to inadequate coverage of a particular location (i.e., the problem in that area is likely to persist), whether additional cell sites are planned in order to correct for a coverage hole, or whether a performance issue is due to a temporary network issue (i.e., the performance for that area is likely to improve at a later time). In addition, it has been difficult for the customer service representative to direct any corrective maintenance actions to appropriate technical personnel for handling in an efficient manner since there is insufficient information available to determine an identification of the cell site involved, whether the subscriber was in a coverage hole (i.e., whether service is even available at the location), or the current performance status of potential cell sites that may have handled the call.